The Killing Room
( Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne - 6 )
Richard Montanari
Richard Montanari
The Killing Room
A hard heart shall fear evil at the last:
and he that loveth danger shall perish in it.
— ECCLESIASTICUS, 3:27
ONE
THE CHILDREN OF DISOBEDIENCE
And the smoke of the incense,
which came with the prayers of the saints,
ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.
— REVELATION, 8:4
ONE
When she was a young girl, before the night embraced her with its great black wings, and blood became her sacramental wine, she was, in every way, a child of light. To those who knew her in those years she seemed a studious girl, quiet and polite, given to watching clouds for hours on end, oblivious, as only the very young can be, to the crushing poverty that surrounded her, the chains that had enslaved her kind for five generations.
She was six years old before she wore a pair of shoes she did not share. She was eight before she buttoned a dress someone had not stained before her.
For the longest time she lived inside the high stone walls of her mind, a place where there were no shadows, no demons.
In her thirteenth year, on a night when the candles fell cold and the moon was not to be found, she met the darkness for the first time. Not the darkness that follows day, descending upon the earth in a deep violet blush, but rather that which dwells within men, men who travel the hardpan roads, gathering to them the mad, the fallen, the corrupt of heart, their deeds the silt of backwater lore. On that night a seed was sown in her body, her spirit.
Now, these many years later, in this place of misery and wretchedness, in this house of seven churches, she knows she belongs.
There are no angels here.
The devil walks these streets. She knows him well — his face, his touch, his scent — because in her thirteenth year, when God turned his head, it was to the devil she was given.
She had watched the young man for more than a week, having first spotted him on Market Street near the Eleventh Street station, a gaunt figure etched on a granite wall. He was not an aggressive panhandler — indeed, his nearly skeletal body and spectral presence would not have presented much of a threat to anyone — but was instead a man reduced to mumbling incoherently to passersby, commuters rushing to and from the station. Twice he had been moved along by police officers, offering no resistance or response. His spirit, it seemed, had long ago been purloined by his addictions, the siren call of the streets.
On most nights, after the evening rush hour, he would walk Market Street toward the Delaware River, toward Old City, stopping those who looked like an easy mark, cadging the occasional handful of coins, grubbing the infrequent cigarette.
She always followed him at a safe distance. Like most of his breed he went unnoticed, except to those like him, or those who would use him. On those rare occasions when he found a homeless shelter with room, he would stay the night, but would always take up position outside the Eleventh Street station by 6:30 a.m., beginning his cycle of despair and degradation all over again.
Once she followed him into a convenience store on Third Street, and watched as he pocketed high-sugar foods — honey buns, DingDongs, TastyKakes — all with one yellowed eye on the convex mirrors at the end of the aisle. She watched him wolf down the food in a nearby alley, only to throw it all up moments later.
On this day, when temperatures are predicted to drop below zero, she knows it is time.
Bundled in four thin sweaters and a pea coat ripped at both shoulder seams, the young man stands shivering in a doorway on Eighth Street near Walnut.
She approaches him, stopping a few feet away, still mostly in shadow. He looks up. In his watery eyes she sees herself, and knows the spirit is stirring.
‘Spare change?’ he asks.
It is as if she can hear the bones clattering in his chest.
He is in his twenties, but the skin around his eyes is purplish and sallow, the stubble on his face already gray. His hair is greasy beneath his watch cap. His fingernails are bitten raw. Blisters bubble on the back of his hands.
She remains in shadow, holds out a gloved hand. At first the young man is skeptical, but when she steps into the light, and he sees her eyes for the first time, he knows. He takes her hand as a hungry man would accept a crust of bread.
‘Do you remember your promise?’ she asks.
He hesitates before answering. They always do. In this moment she can all but hear the wheels turning, the fevered reasoning in his mind. In the end they remember, because this is the one vow they all know will one day be recalled. A single tear rivers down his scalded cheek.
‘Yes.’
She glances down, notices a dark stain blossoming on the front of his trousers. He is wetting himself. She has seen this before, too. The release.
‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘I will show you what you need to do.’
The young man steps forward on unsteady legs. She helps him. He seems to possess no weight at all, as if he were sculpted of steam.
At the mouth of the alley she stops, turns the young man to face her fully. ‘He will need to hear your words. Your exact words.’
His lips begin to tremble. ‘Can’t I tell just you instead?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Your contract was with him, not me.’
The young man wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Then he is real after all.’
‘Oh, my, yes.’ She points to the dark niche at the end of the alley. ‘Would you meet him now?’
The young man shakes his head. ‘No. I’m afraid.’
She meets his gaze in silence. A few moments pass.
‘May I ask a question?’
‘Of course,’ she says.
He takes a deep breath, exhales. His breath is warm and vaporous and sour. ‘What do I call you?’
There are many answers to this. At one time she would have been called Magdalene. At another, Babylon. At one time, indeed, Legion.
Instead of answering the question she takes his arm. She thinks about the approaching days, the end days, and what they are about to do. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos. There is an order to it all. If there was no order she would surely go mad, and then she would live among the low people: the wicked, the dispossessed, the forsaken.
They dissolve into the city, followed by a long and solitary shadow. Around them the winter winds swirl, but she no longer feels the cold.
It has begun.
Seed, flesh, bone, dust.
Order.
TWO
The kid looked doomed.
Detective Kevin Francis Byrne had seen it many times before — the blank stare, the knotted shoulders, the hands loosely held, ready to become fists at the slightest provocation. The tension, Byrne knew, was institutional, a twisted wire in the middle of the back that never uncoiled, never relented. Sadness haunted the eyes. Fear was carried on the shoulders.
For this kid, and the millions like him, there were enemies around every corner, dangers in every noise, whispers in the night that said:
What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine — you just don’t know it yet.
The boy was eleven, but his eyes were an old man’s eyes. He wore a dark blue hoodie, frayed at the cuffs, low-slung jeans, at least two fads out of date. His rust-colored Timberlands were scuffed and rutted, too large for his feet. Byrne noticed that the boots were tied with different type laces; rawhide on one boot, nylon on the other. He wondered if this was a fashion statement, or done out of necessity. The kid leaned against the dirty redbrick wall, waiting, watching
, another ghost haunting the city of Philadelphia.
As Byrne crossed Twelfth Street, bunching his collar to the raw February wind, he considered what he was about to do. He had recently signed up for a mentoring program called Philly Brothers, a group loosely patterned on Big Brothers Big Sisters. This was his first meeting with the boy.
In his time on the force Kevin Byrne had taken down some of the darkest souls ever to walk the streets of his city, but this encounter scared the hell out of him. And he knew why. This was more than just a man reaching out to an at-risk kid. Much more.
‘Are you Gabriel?’ Byrne asked. He had a picture of the boy in his jacket pocket, a school photo from two years earlier. He decided not to take it out. If he did it would probably only embarrass the kid.
As he got closer Byrne noticed that whatever tension was in the boy’s shoulders ratcheted up a notch. The kid raised his eyes, but did not look into Byrne’s eyes. He aimed his gaze, instead, to a place somewhere in the middle of Byrne’s forehead. It was an old salesman’s trick, and Byrne wondered where this kid had picked it up, or if he even knew he was doing it.
‘They call me G-Flash,’ the boy said softly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, saying this as if it were common knowledge.
‘All right. G-Flash it is,’ Byrne said. ‘My name is Kevin. I’m your Philly-’
‘Brother,’ the kid said with a scowl. He put his hands into the pockets of the hoodie, probably to ward off any kind of handshake. Byrne found his own hand suspended in space, halfway between himself and the kid, and suddenly didn’t know what to do with it.
‘I already had a brother,’ the kid added, almost in a whisper.
Byrne rocked back on his heels, looked around, at the moment lost for words. ‘You made it here okay on the bus?’ he finally asked.
The kid smirked. ‘The bus go where the bus go. I was just on it, right? Not like I’m driving it.’
Before Byrne could respond, a PPD sector car, parked in front of Maggiano’s, a half-block away, fired up its lights and siren, taking off on a call. The only two people standing near the doors of Reading Terminal Market who didn’t look up were Byrne and the kid. Sirens were a big part of both their lives.
Byrne glanced at his watch, even though he knew exactly what time it was. ‘So, do you want to get some lunch?’
The kid shrugged.
‘What do you like to eat?’ Byrne asked.
Another shrug. Byrne had to do a quick remodeling of his own attitude. Usually, when he encountered this kind of wall, it was with a suspect. In those instances his inclination was to kick the wall, as well as the suspect, to the ground. This was different.
‘Chinese, KFC, hoagies?’ Byrne continued.
The kid looked back over his shoulder, his level of boredom nearing the red line. ‘They a’ight, I guess.’
‘What about roast pork?’ Byrne asked. ‘You like roast pork?’
Byrne saw the slightest upturn of one corner of the kid’s mouth. Nothing close to a smile. God forbid. The kid liked roast pork.
‘C’mon,’ Byrne said, reaching for the door handle. ‘They have the best roast pork sandwiches in the city in here.’
‘I ain’t got no money.’
‘That’s all right. My treat.’
The kid kicked at an imaginary pebble. ‘I don’t want you buying me nothin’.’
Byrne held the door open for a few seconds, letting two women in. Then two more. This was getting awkward. ‘Tell you what, I’ll buy us lunch today. If we like each other — and there’s no guarantee of that, believe me, I don’t like too many people — then the next time we get together you can buy me lunch. If not, I’ll send you a bill for half.’
The kid almost smiled again. To cover it, he looked up Filbert Street, making Byrne work. The moment drew out, but Byrne was ready for it this time. The kid had no idea who he was dealing with. Kevin Byrne had spent the past twenty years of his life as a homicide detective, at least half of that on stakeouts. He could outlast a cement block.
‘A’ight,’ the kid finally said. ‘Whatever. Cold out here anyway.’
And with that Gabriel ‘G-Flash’ Hightower rolled through the door, into Reading Terminal Market.
Detective Kevin Byrne followed.
As Byrne and the kid waited in line at DiNic’s neither of them spoke. Despite the cacophony of sounds — the half-dozen languages, the rattle of plates, the swish of slicing machines, the steel spatulas scraping across grills — the silence between Gabriel and himself was profound. Byrne had no idea what to say. His own daughter Colleen, who was now in her first year at Gallaudet University, had grown up with so many advantages this kid had not. If you could call having a father like Kevin Byrne an advantage. Still, despite being deaf from birth, Colleen had flourished.
The kid standing next to him, hands still in his pockets, steely glare in place, had grown up in hell.
Byrne knew that Gabriel’s father had never been in the picture, and that his mother had died when the boy was three. Tanya Wilkins was a prostitute and a drug addict, and had frozen to death one frigid January night, passed out in an alley in Grays Ferry. Gabriel’s only brother, Terrell, committed suicide two years ago.
Since then, Gabriel rattled from one foster home to another. He’d had a few minor scrapes with the law, mostly shoplifting, but there was no doubt which way he was headed.
When they got to the counter Byrne ordered them a full sandwich each. The sandwiches from DiNic’s were so big that Byrne had only finished one by himself on a handful of occasions, but he ordered them one each anyway, instantly regretting it, acknowledging that he was trying to show off.
The kid’s eyes got wide when he saw that the huge sandwich was all for him — not to mention the additional bag of chips and a soda — but he went back to his pre-teen too cool for school posturing just as quickly.
They found a table, sat down, spread out, dug in.
As they ate in silence, Byrne tried to think of some kind of conversation with which to engage the kid. He imagined sports would be a safe topic. Both the Flyers and the Sixers were playing. Instead, he remained silent.
Ten minutes later he looked at Gabriel, who was already more than half done. Byrne had to wonder when was the last time the kid had eaten.
‘Good sandwich, huh?’ he asked.
The kid shrugged. Byrne figured he was at that stage. Byrne had been a shrugger at around thirteen or fourteen, everything posed to him a conundrum, every question an interrogation. Instead of exposing his ignorance on a subject, like most young teenagers and pre-teens, he’d simply feign indifference with a shrug. Times were different now. Eleven, it seemed, was the new fourteen. Hell, eleven was probably the new eighteen.
As they finished their sandwiches Gabriel pushed up the sleeves on his hoodie. Despite Byrne’s best intentions he scanned the kid’s arms, hands, neck, looking for tattoos or burn marks or wounds that might have meant an initiation into a gang. If ever there was a kid ripe for recruitment, it was Gabriel Hightower.
Byrne saw nothing. He couldn’t decide if this meant the kid didn’t need someone like him in his life, or just the opposite: that this was a pivotal time, a time when Gabriel might need him the most.
When they finished they sat in a fresh silence, one that preceded the end of their visit. Byrne looked down at the table, and there saw a small, beautifully folded paper boat. Gabriel had idly crafted it out of the paper in which the sandwiches were wrapped.
‘Can I take a look at that?’ Byrne asked.
The kid nudged it closer with a forefinger.
Byrne picked it up. The folds were precise and elegant. It was clearly not the first time Gabriel had made something like this. ‘This is pretty cool.’
‘Called origami,’ Gabriel said. ‘Chinese or something.’
‘You have a real talent,’ Byrne said. ‘I mean, this is really good.’
One more shrug. Byrne wondered what the world record was.
When th
ey stepped out onto the street the lunchtime crowd had thinned. Byrne had the rest of the day off, and was going to suggest doing something else — a trip to the mall maybe, or a tour of the Roundhouse — but he figured the kid had probably had enough of him for a first date.
‘Come on,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ll give you a ride home.’
The kid took a half-step away. ‘I got bus money.’
‘I’m going that way anyway,’ Byrne lied. ‘It’s really no big deal.’
The kid started rooting around in his pocket for coins.
‘I don’t drive a police car, you know,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s just a shitty old Taurus with bad shocks and a worse radio.’
The kid smiled at the word shitty. Byrne took out his keys.
‘Come on. Save the bus money.’
Byrne grabbed the lead, walked across the street, willing himself not to turn around to see if Gabriel was following.
About a block up Filbert he caught sight of a small shadow coming up next to him.
The group home where Gabriel Hightower lived was on Indiana Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets, deep into a blighted area of North Philly called the Badlands. Byrne took Third Street north and, during the entire ride, neither of them said a word. When Byrne turned onto Indiana Gabriel said, ‘This is cool right here.’
The group home was nearly a block away.
‘I’ll take you all the way. It’s not a problem.’
The kid didn’t say anything. Byrne acquiesced and pulled over. They were now a half block from one of the most infamous drug corners in the city. It didn’t take Byrne long to spot two young men scouting the area for 5–0. He caught the eye of one hard-looking kid of about eighteen, trying his best to look inconspicuous. Byrne threw the look back until the kid looked away. The spotter took out a cell and sauntered in the other direction. Byrne had clearly been made. He put the Taurus in park, kept the engine running.
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